This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
This sort of reminds me of teh debate over statistical trends right after somewhere legalizes prostitution.
I'll say the same thing I have there: the long-term new status quo of a dramatic policy change is hard to deduce from the short-term reactions, and the trends in a world where something is legal everywhere are different from the trends where it's illegal everywhere except for one place.
Of course it would be better for the legalization argument if the day after everything was legalized, overdose deaths dropped 50% and never went up again. But that was probably never realistic...
The long-term vision is that we move to a model of treatment rather than criminalization, and lifting stigmas and fear of arrest makes it easier for people to find treatment or be targeted for it. But was a comprehensive and experienced treatment infrastructure deployed on the same day that the measure took effect? Did insurance start covering such treatment? Was the social stigma immediately lifted?
The long-term vision under legalization is that reputable, regulated corporations can start selling safe versions of drugs, complete with doctor-approved dosing instructions and Surgeon's general warnings and hotlines to call for help on the side of the package, instead of people getting unsafe street drug fro dealers that are incentivized to push them into more and more addictive shit. But did the measure even make it legal for corporations to operate in such a way, let alone have they actually started doing so?
The long-term vision is that people growing up under legalization can seek treatment and talk to people about the problems early in the process, and be less stigmatized and less pushed into a criminal part of society, and therefore make better decision and have better average outcomes. But what we're seeing today is mostly existing long-term heavy addicts suddenly having an easier time getting their fix, not anything about long-term trends for people growing up in the system.
And, of course, if a particular vice is legal one place and illegal everywhere surrounding it, lots of 'enthusiasts' will travel/move there to indulge, tainting the statistics.
Again, obviously this data is not good for the legalization argument, it is in fact evidence against it. But there's lots of reasons to expect short-term reactions to be bad in a way that the long-term equilibrium might not be. Especially in the case where you want to replace a bad solution to a problem with a good solution to a problem, but have so far only taken the step of removing the bad solution, which is mostly what I think is happening here.
I'm still optimistic about long-term trends, particularly if people actually devote the resources and effort into installing the new solution.
I think a difficulty is that providing treatment at the scale required is expensive and the people using the services that do exist are generally indigent and therefore cannot contribute to those programs. The ROÍ for treatment is also mostly to the individual getting treatment, not the public as the new rehabbed patient is likely to be replaced with someone else. So from the public tax point of view, rehabbing druggies is a cost sunk, and a relatively expensive one. Getting the public to approve of enough taxes to fully fund rehabs is running against the problem that there’s no large scale benefit to paying that tax. So there won’t really be enough money for enough treatment centers to make rehab a viable part of the program. What it leaves is “decriminalize drugs.” Which brings with it homelessness and street crime.
This, plus the fact that we have no idea how to do "treatment" that actually works. Scott posted loooooong ago that honest studies on rehab for alcoholism fail to beat a placebo. The end goal of most rehab studies for harder drugs like potent opioids isn't even "stops using potent opioids"; it's "maybe uses potent opioids slightly less and gets up to criminal mischief slightly less often". The true believers in the idea that we're just going to "apply 'treatment' directly to the forehead", if we just try hard enough politically and decide to spend enough money, and that it will magically convert addicts into non-addicts/non-users, are just banging their heads against reality.
Scott's post is worth re-reading.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I can't really imagine it being at all likely that the long term equilibrium would have fewer drugs. Legalization has a normalizing effect, so you get more of it. I would imagine that there is more marijuana use in all the states that have legalized it than previously.
Social stigma can serve a useful role: it keeps use down somewhat.
Lowering drug use is a worthwhile aim, the decrease in use of cigarettes has been a good thing.
It could be true that legalization, if done in the right ways, could result in lower overdoses: you could easily imagine making the companies producing the drugs liable for any overdoses due to them. But there would still be overdoses due to misuse.
And, of course, I don't think the only harms are overdoses.
Agreed that 'what are the real harms beyond overdoses' is the important question here.
And I think it has to be a lot more nuanced than 'making it legal means more'. I think in a sense that's true, sure, but it overlooks usage dynamics.
Like, if you legalized fentanyl and nothing else, sure more people will use fentanyl. But fentanyl is 'popular' right now because it is more addictive and cheaper to produce than other drugs, drug dealers prefer to push it on clients and mix small amounts of it into other drugs to increase their potency and addictiveness, it's not popular primarily because people are freely choosing it over other alternatives on a free market.
If you legalize fentanyl and oxycodone and hydrocodone and opium and heroin and extasy and lsd and shrooms, and you get corporations to make them so they're pure and clearly labelled and have warning labels about their addictiveness and risks, and they're all mas produced commodities with reasonably comparable prices, do you still have the same level of fentanyl epidemic?
I do believe you get 'more' drug use, but I'd expect it to fall more to less harmful drugs, and less destructive patterns of use. I'd expect more people to be getting clear guidance and feedback from friends and family to slow the rate at which they increase their dosage, keeping them less messed up for longer. I'd expect commercial drugs to be less expensive in ways that limit how much people have to sell everything they own and turn to crime ot afford their fix. I'd expect it to be harder to fund an addiction with criminal activities when you're buying from a respectable businesss with security cameras and transaction records the police can subpoena and corporate liability to watch out for, instead of from another criminal off the books.
Etc.
Basically, I think the generic 'amount' of drugs used doesn't correlate that much with the amount of harm caused, compared to the effect of changing the social and legal regime in which that use happens.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
How do we define "short-term" reactions? A year? A decade? A century? How do we disambiguate from the highly convinient and entirely degenerate "n + 10 years, where n is equal to the current time since the policy's introduction"?
Does this argument work the other way? If ODs had in fact dropped 50% the next day, would we likewise be asking if this was only a temporary effect, and entirely dire outcomes were still to be expected at some indeterminate future date?
If implementing a policy locally will cause it to fail disastrously and the only way to do it properly is to implement it globally, isn't it on the people supporting the policy to know this ahead of time and not to push for local implementation?
I would certainly agree that complete drug legalization dropping OD deaths 50% is not a realistic expectation. Of course, I am not an advocate for total drug legalization. What did the advocates expect? What predictions did they make about what their policy would achieve? were those predictions accurate? If not, why should people trust their new predictions?
If these steps were necessary for the policy to succeed, how did the policy address them, and when it became clear that they would not or could not be addressed, why was the policy not promptly reversed?
...Every point you make superficially resembles a valid critique, but at no point do you explain why these issues were not foreseen and accounted for, or why the policy was implemented despite them. Would you expect this policy, as implemented, to dramatically increase drug deaths, drug abuse and human misery generally? I would, because I think the policy itself is ideological lunacy spouted by idiots who have no understanding of how the world and humans in it function. If you think the general idea was good but the implementation sucked, it behooves you and people like you to make that clear in advance, and to fight like hell to prevent the bad implementation from happening. Because what actually happened here, it seems to me, is that a standard pillar of Progressive ideology was implemented under favorable conditions by true believers, promptly failed catastrophically, and that you are now explaining why we shouldn't learn anything actionable from the highly visible and extremely dramatic results. This is probably the best possible play, given the givens of situation and commitments, but one feels justified in pointing out that it is not a very good play in an objective sense.
Meanwhile, other questions linger. How many people has this policy killed? How many lives has it ruined? Where does it sit on the scale of contemporary American atrocities, in a concrete sense? I have no actual idea, but I'd be interested to know. It's very easy to be carried along by the journo-engineered affect of a story while establishing zero grounding to what the facts of the story actually mean in concrete terms. This story describes a lot of bad things, but "a lot" is not very specific. Maybe it really is not that big of a deal! But if it is a big deal, people should be able to recognize the bigness, right?
If Reds implemented a policy with similar consequences that you feel were entirely predictable, would you take a similar long view? How does this compare, in concrete terms, to the Red repeal of Roe v Wade? Better? Worse? Different, and if so, why? I'm sure if Roe has resulted in a dramatic, undeniable uptick in horrifying outcomes, that information should not be hard to find. If, in an objective sense, this policy killed more people than the repeal of Roe, should we consider it a worse policy than the repeal of Roe? If people nonetheless considered this no big deal and Roe a five-alarm emergency, is that interesting information? And obviously the facts could go the other way, and the reverse would be true as well, and Roe is a national policy versus a state policy in this case, etc, etc, but I imagine you get the drift.
How likely do you think it that some other location within the US is going to try the same policy again, and are you willing to predict the results of a reproduction? I personally think it's quite likely, given the long history of our social systems proving incapable to learn from experience, never mind example.
I bite the bullet on this. I claim that America's experience with the 18th and 21st amendments is the template for how these kinds of things usually play out.
Its starts off with X fully legal and embedded in society, despite a vociferous minority pointing to the substantial harms that X causes. Eventually X is prohibited by law. The shop shelves are swept bare. The factories shut down. Xaholics get a brutal wake up call. Many quit X cold turkey. Some get medical help tapering. Perhaps some die of withdrawal or toxic substitutes. By the end of the first year prohibition is looking like a great success. Skeptics predicted a tidal wave of prosecutions for X-offences, but it doesn't materialize, because people cannot get X.
(Possession of alcohol was never illegal, just manufacture, sale, and transportation. Initially that was tactically shrewd. Ordinary people could see it coming, stock up, and then consume their private stocks, expecting others to do the hard work of campaigning for the 21st amendment. The day of the last bottle of wine was different in different households, weakening coordination against prohibition. In the long term that was perhaps the undoing of prohibition. Only the seller faced legal penalties, so the black market that developed was asymmetrical, with lots of undeterred buyers and a few sellers, well paid for their legal risk.)
Time passes and the initial success wears well. At least it seems to. Networks of friends are gradually forming. Brewing at home. Making a still. Getting hold of a bottle of wine to share with trusted friends over Sunday dinner. It is all metaphorically flying under radar. The Prohibitionists don't see that their victory is rotting. Now-a-days there would be drone smuggling, literally flying under radar :-)
Home brewing and piece meal smuggling are annoying for those who just want a drink. Money starts changing hands. The black market grows. Prohibitionists start to realize that alcohol is still for sale, but covertly and for a fancy price. Some are inclined to turn a blind eye. If it is too expensive for people to afford to become alcoholics, that mitigates the harms. Other prohibitionists resent the disobedience and insist on stronger penalties.
Full time employment in the black economy now splits into insiders and outsiders. Outsiders get rich on the high price of booze, but they sometimes get caught and go to jail. Insiders don't get as rich because they share their money with the police as bribes. It gets complicated. The bribe-taking police need to make a show of doing their jobs. The insiders resent the endless supply of outsiders in search of easy money, increasing the supply and lowering the profits. Fortunately they have the police on their side to enforce their monopoly of the alcohol supply. They tip off "their" policemen. It gets more complicated, with rival groups of insiders setting their own paid-for police on intruders on their turf who are also insiders, just bribing other policemen.
Meanwhile the smugglers are tackling the volume issue. The secret compartment has a limited volume V. The more potent your version of X, the more doses you can fit in V. In the 1920's that meant smuggling spirits rather than beer. Today that means smuggling fentanyl rather than heroin. Then there is the business of cutting drugs, adulterating them to increase the bulk after smuggling.
Eventually the situation is out of control. Every-one who wants X knows the secret handshakes and the special places. They get their hands on it. Some of it is adulterated and death rate is higher than before prohibition. The point I like to emphasize is that this takes twenty or thirty years. By the time the death rate comes back up and exceeds the old death rate from legal X, the world has changed.
The world has changed, but how much? You get one group of public health experts saying that prohibition has failed and must be repealed. Others saying that we must pivot to harm reduction. Still others say that the world has changed a lot and for the worse. Thank God that we have prohibition keeping a lid on the problems of X. If we repealed prohibition the death rate would soar still higher. Who is right?
My claim is that prohibition is a dangerous policy option because it may well fail, and that the American experiment with the prohibition alcohol was untypical in exactly one way: it proved possible to repeal it. You should expect that prohibition of X works well for the first five years. When thirty years have gone by and it has clearly failed, you will not be able to repeal it. Campaigners for prohibition will have happy memories of the first five years, and consider that short term success proves the eternal correctness of prohibition.
I think this reasoning fails to get off the ground, for reasons that may be coincident with what FC is getting at. "Prohibition of X" is different for different values of X. What is the nature of X? How does it come to be? Where? By who? What is its size? Use? Alternatives? Etc. That is, people have prohibited alcohol, drugs, prescription drugs, small guns, large guns, of course you can throw in F-16s and nuclear weapons, or even just Chinese drywall. The list goes on. People have also tried prohibiting things that are less than tangible, like encryption or killing babies, or all sorts of stuff. I see almost no reason why there should be a single schema that dictates how every possible prohibition of every possible X will (not) work. Different things are different. Some may be extremely difficult to prohibit; others may be relatively easier. It is likely impossible to do any with 100% success everywhere, because 100% success is just not a thing in law/public policy (I guess there's probably some guy out there who is just really determined to bring over some Chinese drywall... and for Sagan's sake, we can't even get to zero killed babies), so we usually have to use some other metrics for success.
I accept that you are 95% right about the big picture. The huge difference between coffee and fentanyl is the only thing that really matters.
Notice though, that I zoomed in on the specific issue of timing. Who dares to doubt an intervention that works well for the first year? I dare.
Looking at my reasoning, we see that it is mostly about social dynamics. Friends put out feelers to friends. The black market slowly becomes monetized and professionalized. Since it is illegal to offer bribes to policemen, there are several years of nudges and winks before police corruption takes hold. The social dynamics set a slow time scale that is not obviously related to specifics of what has been prohibited.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Do you believe prohibition to be simply impossible to implement well, or is it just that we did a bad job of it?
I believe that prohibition works less well than its mainstream advocates expect. I think the gap is huge. Mainstream advocates of prohibition never grasp how poorly it works and never admit the extent of the problems. Within the constraints of Western Morality (you cannot just take the addicts out and shoot them) the problems are unfixable, we didn't merely do a bad job of it.
On the other hand I notice a fatal flaw in my reasoning. I assume, based on pure optimism, that there is a good solution to the problems of substance abuse. I see that prohibition works very badly. Legal permissiveness is an alternative. I have my unjustified axiom that there is a solution, so I hope that legal permissiveness is that solution and does actually work. This is embarrassingly silly. In general terms nothing prevents legal permissiveness from being an even worse disaster than prohibition.
Of course the details of the particular substance in question are decisive. Legal permissiveness works very well for coffee, but it might turn out to be a mega-death disaster for fentanyl.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think the key point here is that without federal legalisation, there can be no reputable drugs industry, which means state legalisation just lets the criminals run rampant and magnifies rather than eliminates the dirty-drugs problem. I think you are correct that without federal legalisation everyone involved should have HCFed and not attempted state legalisation anyway.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link